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Third presentation – progress update

During this presentation we first updated the class about our more concrete plans for the visualization as already described in a previous post. Subsequently, we presented the progress made with the implementation in d3js.

Below you can see the progress made on the part of small multiples showing trendlines. Here we have already implemented the listener trends (for every song, the trend in the weekly number of listeners). Each block of one color represents one song and its listeners. When a song is no longer in the top 50s, there is a white space. When hovering over a block, the title and artist of the song are displayed. The number of listeners are normalized in this view.

Small multiples

The following two pictures show two possible map implementation. The first one show a equirectangular representation of the world, the second one is a mercator projection. Countries can already be colored, the implementation to make this dependent on our data still needs to be coded as well as the timeline function. During our presentation we asked which map projection would be the best. Their was a consensus on the first one, equirectangular, being the best.

World map v1 – equirectangular

World map v2 – mercator

We have choosen to use a single hue color scale in green, with the darkest color signifying the best ranked songs. We have used ColorBrewer to determine our colors.

Thirdly, we have also started on the dropdown visualization, making it possible to compare country rankings. Below you can see the current progress.

One mayor problem we are facing at the moment is that the data of LastFM is currently not being updated anymore. We have contacted LastFM and will look into other sources/alternatives.

FEEDBACK

it would be good to include some explanation with the small multiples as this is not clear at the first glance. ==> This is indeed included in our worked out plan, but we didn’t have the time yet to implement this

maybe a line chart or line chart with colored area underneath would give a clearer view for the small multiples ==> We will look into these possibilities as well

an overlay will be provided to change views but it would also be good to include navigation by clicking on songs, countries … ==> this is intended in our plan

check on the website of LastFM whether the problem with your data lies with them or with our program downloading the data. Possibly contact them to ask for an update ==> A message was posted by them 10 days ago that their system is down and they are looking into fixing this. We have contacted their team explaining that we are dependent on their information for this project and asked for an update. We will also already start looking into other options.

As a comment on the feeling meter per song, we were pointed on the fact to focus on the main story, visualization. ==> we believe the feeling of a song could explain why certain songs are popular in certain countries or how fast a song goes viral. The implementation of this feature however will be of second priority.

Concerning the possible projections of the world map, take a look at what the major services such as Google Maps use as a projection. ==> a poll in class showed that there was a consensus about the first projection being the best, Google Maps however uses the second projection.

Some very interesting suggestions and feedback were given, we will certainly take those into account during the further implementation.